Question, have you ever felt like you have been pigeonholed into specific languages? I am feeling more and more like I am getting forced onto projects because to few people know the language (LabVIEW). getting tired of it, and not sure what the way out is.

Labviews, you spend more time adjusting wires than thinking about solutions. Has that gotten better? I always felt like the diagramming was a shitting excuse for coding.

@Demolishun truth. Has it gotten better? no, i'd arguably say it has gotten worse at least in my case when trying to update labview 7.1 to 2019.

somebody long ago decided labview was the "hit thing" so we have a ton of projects that are stuck in this hell.

I think the best thing is to go someplace that doesn't have the thing you feel assigned to.

They can't do it if it isn't there ;)

@N00bPancakes it's not that there are not projects that use other languages, it's that too few people have experience with labview.

Ways out of it is either to find someone to offer as your replacement maybe like train a junior OR resign and find some other company where you can get to work on something else.

Do you have the option to rewrite?

Can your write dynamic libraries?

https://forums.ni.com/t5/...

Then when most of the app is in C/C++ you can go to management and say, look, most of the code is C/C++. Can we use something else? Qt comes to mind. But not sure what libraries you need from labviews. Are you stuck in labviews instrument hell?

LabVIEW?!

Also, does labviews have c/c++ libraries to talk to their instruments so you can just write a c/c++ project instead?

@Demolishun I have asked, but always gets shut down.

@lydeking yes

@Ryan434 So they have limited labor pool to write labviews. The labor pool that exists wants to use something else. If you get an offer from somewhere else are they going to realize that they are losing a limited labor pool due to choice of tech? I mean having someone who can port to new tech is better than nobody to support old tech.

@Demolishun it's a little more complicated with time constraints and contract req's, but yeah. It seems talent pool for labview is always tied up in other projects as well.

frustrating.

Don't learn to use something you don't want to use. Otherwise you might end up having to use it.

@electrineer I saw some 20 year old perl code, and just said "fuck no". Still don't know any perl.

@Demolishun I recently wrote some perl for the first time and... that was kinda weird. I made a short script and there were already wtf moments.

Yes.

At first, everything was pushing me into PHP. No matter where I looked, the only openings were for PHP jobs. Nobody cared about anything else.

So, I learned PHP.
I hated it.

Eventually I got tired of it and started learning Ruby. I picked up an IT job to pay the bills, and from there went on to being the network admin, sysadmin, and domain admin. Yes, all at the same time. The IT department consisted of only two of us, and we could have easily found work for ten. I continued learning Ruby from there, and eventually moved from that mess of responsibilities to being a Ruby/Rails dev, along with some VB projects (yuck).

Ever since, it feels like the only jobs I’ve been able to find have been Rails, despite everything else on my resume. (C++, extensive game dev and design, dev management, sys/network/domain admin, PHP, Perl, VB, JS/React/Angular, SQL, etc.)

Now, I feel like I’m stuck being a Rails dev. I don’t mind quite so much because I really do love Ruby, but apart from that I hate the idea.

Oh damn LabView. I'm sorry you have to deal with this.